I barely have anything to say, so I ride my bike. Last Thursday, I rode through my 5,000th mile of 2020, something I’ve never done before. Like much of 2020, there will need be an asterisk next to this accomplishment, but it felt good to take the morning off and ride. Cycling has become my …
Continue reading ‘On a bike, fighting through the pandemic fog, with Silver Surfer’s help’ »
One of the ongoing struggles for me as an academic outsider working in a university is mastering the language. In the course of a recent discussion of the term “interdisciplinary” (the UNM Water Resources Program is “interdisciplinary”) I ran across this language I put in a program report I wrote last year in which I …
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The conventional simplification of the Colorado River Compact’s water allocation scheme is that it set aside 7.5 million acre feet of water use for the “exclusive beneficial consumptive use” of the states of the Lower Basin – Nevada, Arizona, and California. In the 21st century, the official accounting shows the Lower Basin states using an …
By Eric Kuhn As the Colorado River Basin’s managers wrestle with thorny questions around the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline, a colleague who works for a Lower Colorado River Basin water agency recently asked a question that goes to the heart of the future of river management: With land in the Lower Colorado River Basin, why …
One of our recent University of New Mexico Water Resources Program graduates suggested an extra credit assignment for this year’s students: stream gage scavenger hunt, with selfies. Here’s the measurement point for USGS 08330000, Rio Grande at Albuquerque, NM. Flow at the time I took it yesterday morning measured 111 cubic feet per second. Am …
Continue reading ‘The Gage Selfie Collection: Rio Grande at Albuquerque’ »
Flow on the Rio Grande at Embudo in north-central New Mexico as I write this is measured at 156 cubic feet per second, which is the lowest for this date in history. And its quite a history – Embudo was the first gage installed by the USGS, back in the winter of 1894-95. Note that …
Continue reading ‘Record low flows on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
Shrouded in pandemic fog, I’m only now getting to my sorta annual “Happy New Water Year!” post, where I traditionally look on in alarm at dropping Colorado River Basin reservoir levels and make fun of the Lower Basin for using too much water. The alarm remains – after a crappy runoff, combined storage in the …
Continue reading ‘Happy New Water Year, where’d all that Colorado River water go?’ »
Burnishing my notes for UNM Water Resources class this afternoon to talk about Elinor Ostrom, I spent a bit of my morning going back through the underlined bits in my copy of her seminal book Governing the Commons. I first read it in the fall of 2009, when she won the Swedish prize. My initial …
I’ve driven by the spot in the picture a jillion times in the 30 years I’ve lived in Albuquerque, and never noticed the ditch squeezed between #1 Plumbing and Air and the Chevron station on the corner of Edith and Candelaria. My latest pandemic bike riding project involves scouring GIS data from the Middle Rio …
Continue reading ‘Ghost of Water: The Inauspicious end of the Alameda Lateral’ »
The six Colorado River Basin states that do not have the letters “U-T-A-H” in their names just sent a remarkable letter to Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt with a plea – don’t let the rush toward federal approval of Utah’s proposed Lake Powell Pipeline blow up the Colorado River Basin’s framework of collaborative rather …